Revival or Revisal? How Broadway Is Retrofitting Its Past

If you were following Broadway news yesterday, you might have noticed two seemingly unrelated headlines. The producers of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” the loopy Burton Lane-Alan Jay Lerner musical, announced its closing after a month of critical drubbing, while a new production of “Porgy & Bess”—or, as the Gershwin estate has branded it, “The Gershwins’ Porgy & Bess”—opened to more or less positivereviews. Neither show is exactly a revival. Both are part of the recent vogue for “revisals”: old shows that have been gutted and refurbished, to render them more palatable to modern audiences. Among other benefits (including economic), this approach insures that the production gets talked about, though not always as intended.

In the case of “Clear Day,” the director Michael Mayer, along with the book writer Peter Parnell, spent some fourteen years trying to fix a musical no one really loved in the first place. The original, from 1965, starred Barbara Harris as Daisy, a flighty ingénue who is hypnotized by a psychiatrist. The doctor then falls in love with her past-life incarnation, a nineteenth-century Englishwoman. None of this really makes any sense, and the movie, starring Barbra Streisand, has survived mostly on camp cred and the tunefulness of its title song. In Mayer’s gender-bending rewrite, Daisy became Davey, a gay florist, whose previous self is a female jazz singer from the forties, and the psychiatrist, played by Harry Connick, Jr., becomes enamored with the jazz singer in the bodily form of the florist, who in turn crushes on the psychiatrist. Follow?

Not surprisingly, the overhaul caused as many narrative problems as it solved. Without a serious treatment of the shrink’s apparent bisexuality, the fact that the straight doctor was essentially date-raping a hypnotized gay man made no sense. And it was creepy. The depiction of New York gay life in the seventies (oh, right: the setting was bumped up by a decade) was itself implausibly sanitized. In truth, the musical was too old-fashioned in its day to meaningfully represent psychoanalysis, much less homosexuality. All this, and you lose the musical’s one enduring pleasure: the chance to watch a single actress pull off both characters at once.

With “Porgy & Bess,” the challenge wasn’t to solve the unsolvable, but to fix what wasn’t broke—or was it? The director Diane Paulus and the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wanted to revitalize the musical—or the folk opera, if you prefer—by making it shorter, more psychologically layered, and more authentic to black speech, as the original has long suffered from elements of minstrelsy. (Also, no more goat cart.) But some of the creative team’s comments in the Times during an out-of-town run prompted a gleefully disdainful letter from Stephen Sondheim, a “Porgy” purist, and the revisions were scaled back on the way to New York. (Hilton Als eloquently defended the new version.)

Now that the show has opened, New Yorkers can decide on l’affaire Sondheim for themselves. But it’s worth remembering that another recent “revisal” was of a Sondheim show, “West Side Story,” which was staged in 2009 with some lyrics translated to Spanish. This, too, was done for purposes of authenticity: the Tony-winning song-writer Lin-Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights”), collaborating with Sondheim, tweaked the lyrics so that the Puerto Rican characters sounded more like Puerto Ricans. Like Parks, Miranda was able to bring his fluency with an ethnic vernacular to a show written by white artists. (Never mind that most of the Spanish lyrics were dropped later in the run.) An earlier example is the 2002 revival of the stereotype-plagued Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song,” which was revamped by the Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”).

Theatre is a perpetually self-resuscitating art form, and as more shows age out of their political correctness it will be instructive to see how future “revisals” fare. We as a theatre-going culture will have to decide: do we preserve our qualified nostalgia for flawed classics, or do we yank them into the present, possibly at their own peril? I would say that “Porgy,” bolstered by the megawatt title performances of Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis, makes the best case yet for multicultural retrofitting. Yes, it may be unrecognizable to some, but the life-worn, lovelorn denizens of Catfish Row will be newly recognizable to many others.

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